It’s been just over a year since Intel unveiled Medfield, its first phone SoC, and 10 months since the first devices to use the platform began to hit the market. Medfield was an important launch for Intel — it demonstrated that the company could build x86 chips to smartphone specifications — but the company’s stated goal, from day one, was to produce a competitive product — not a jaw-dropping market leader.

Today, at Mobile World Conference 2013 in Barcelona, Intel is launching Medfield’s successor, codenamed Clover Trail+. The name is rather confusing, since Clover Trail is a tablet platform — Intel could’ve simplified this by calling the new chip “Medfield+.” Nevertheless, Clover Trail+ is a smartphone product. The actual chip will be known as the Atom Z2580 with XMM 6360 (that’s Intel’s own modem solution). The modem is a slight upgrade over the XMM 6260 that shipped with Medfield last year; the 6360 supports up to 42Mbps over HSDPA in a significantly smaller package. Also at MWC, Intel has announced a bunch of Bay Trail (next-gen, out-of-order Atom) and Medfield product wins.

This time around, Intel is launching a full set of SKUs at multiple price points — and it’s ramping up its dual-core smartphone technology is a serious way.

At the high end, the Z2580 will run at up to 2GHz and up to four threads, while the Z2560 and Z2520 top out at 1.6GHz and 1.2GHz respectively. The Z2560 should still be faster than last year’s Medfield, thanks to the benefit of dual-cores, while the Z2520 replaces Intel’s Z2420 (and doubles the number of cores/threads). The other major advantage to Clover Trail+ is the underlying graphics horsepower. Graphics performance was one place where Medfield sagged in comparison to modern smartphones of 2012, and Intel has taken steps to improve 2013 performance. The Z2580 uses a 544GXMP2 chip at up to 533MHz, compared to a 400MHz single-core SGX540 in Medfield.

Clover Trail+’s graphics performance should more than double thanks to this upgrade and could even be faster than Clover Trail’s tablet performance — provided the chip doesn’t exceed its thermal maximum and down-throttle.

The total upgrades at the high end are summarized above. The Z2580 supports four times as much storage, double the cores/threads, keeps a 2GHz boost clock, doubles the maximum RAM, improves the camera imaging sensor and capabilities, and adds support for Android 4.2 (Jelly Bean). We asked Intel whether it intended to support Windows Phone 8 at this juncture, but for now, it’s an Android-only show. When we spoke to Intel, the company confirmed that Android is capable of telling the difference between a logical processor and a physical one and can schedule code optimally — meaning that you won’t end up with threads running on CPU 0 + CPU 1, where CPU 1 is a Hyper-Threaded core, as opposed to executing them on CPU 0 and CPU 2.

Intel’s 2013 positioning

Intel isn’t ready to publicly unveil phones for this morning’s announcements, but we can make some educated guesses about what happens next. Last year, Intel was content with demonstrating that yes, it could build an x86 smartphone platform, picking up a few design wins, and shipping some devices. This year, I think we’ll see more aggressive positioning. The various handset manufacturers are falling all over themselves to build quad-core devices with insanely high-resolution screens that push the boundary between smartphone and tablet. Already, we’ve seen the Nexus 4 — a phone that can’t hit top speed unless you drop it in a freezer. There’s precious little evidence that consumers want phones with a 5.5-inch screen and a four hour battery life, but the market has never been particularly smart about these issues (for reference, consult the Great Android Tablet Debacle of 2011).

Intel still has its own store to mind; the company is claiming that it can drop dual-core CPUs into smartphones without reducing the process technology or lowering the clock speeds. If true, that’s quite impressive. Assuming Chipzilla pulls it off, the Clover Trail+ phones that launch in 2013 should offer an excellent balance between power consumption and performance. Intel’s goal for 2013 is to demonstrate that it can build a better smartphone with a yearly cycle of substantial improvements.

That said, Clover Trail+ is still an iteration of an old in-order core. Intel won’t be fighting with its a-game until the launch of Bay Trail late in 2013. Bay Trail is the 22nm full overhaul of the Atom core that eschews Hyper-Threading in favor of native quad-core at 22nm. At MWC 2013 in Barcelona, Intel has already announced ODM and OEM support for Bay Trail tablets to arrive in the 2013 holiday season. We’re still dubious of the long-term benefits of quad-core in mobile, but Intel has an unmatched track record in reducing overall power consumption and will be a full node ahead of its competition once it moves to 22nm.

Tagged In

[…]Android is capable of telling the difference between a logical processor and a physical one and can schedule code optimally[…]

Android is built on the Linux kernel that can tell that difference since Pentium 4 times

GatzLoc

Bulldozer should be on it then. :P

Thing with Intel is, it has the money to take things slow, see how they pan out and out-do everyone.

The other thing about the market is, for example there’s not many android tablets. If someone hates the playbook, and doesn’t like/cant afford apple they really have to choose between a galaxy tab 2 or a nexus 7.

So the market isn’t smart or stupid but if people ‘need’ to buy something to get their tasks done, they will choose from what is availible. The dif. btwn a leader and follower is recognizing that.

http://profiles.google.com/ee2718 admin 1

Intel’s failures in the low power stakes aren’t because things didn’t stake out – it is because they are handicapped by the baggage carried by x86 architecture in that it has to support binary code compatibility going back to the 486 (which is necessary for Windows). This baggage means that their chips have to use far more transistors and consume more power than the equivalent ARM processors, and even Intel’s advantage in fabrication prowess and money, hasn’t been able to redress the balance. If Intel is going to carry the x86 baggage, then they should at least aim at those devices where carrying that baggage has some advantage – ie. Windows devices.

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http://profiles.google.com/ee2718 admin 1

The problem is that although Intel keeps improving their Atom, processors, ARM is doing the same thing and keeps beating Intel with a faster, cheaper lower power device before Intel gets theirs into production. Take the much hyped and delayed dual core Clovertrail chips. They were beaten for speed and power by the dual core A15 Exynos 5 chips before Intel managed to get them into production. The much hyped Medway chip – Motorola was the only manufacturer to put them into production on one of their phones – not a great success.

Why is this? Because despite the hype, they don’t perform and have only managed to equal or beat last gen ARM chips, and they do this at a huge price markup. The only thing that these Atom chips have going for them is Windows compatibility. Unfortunately they are very slow compared to the chips that Windows apps normally run on and so the Windows experience they provide is very poor. I think Intel would be much more sensible putting effort into reducing battery consumption of their i3 processors so as to give Windows laptops a better battery life, than to try to compete head on with ARM on smartphones and tablets, which is a losing proposition. At least by doing this, they leverage the one advantage they have over ARM.

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